National Geographic explains that although ambergris is whale vomit, it’s typically known to discharge from the whale’s rear. After the couple recognized they stumbled upon a discharged gem, they careful coddled it in a scarf.

Gary and Angela, 49, are fielding offers from interested parties in France and New Zealand, according to a Guardian report. The use of ambergris is illegal in the United States and Australia in an effort to curb whale exploitation. The account was reported in The Huffington Post.

According to a NASA release, the Kepler spacecraft is no longer in Emergency Mode, running on fuel-burn mode. But experts are still uncertain as to why the vessel switched to EM, Tech Times reports. On Sunday, Kepler was stable. Its antenna was pointing to the Earth signaling that the Deep Space Network ground communications were on a normal timetable allowing scientists to capture data from Earth.

Kepler converted to EM nearly 14 hours ago during its scheduled trajectory towards the Milky Way Center for NASA’s Campaign 9 mission intended for microlensing observations. NASA has thus reasoned that the spacecraft’s mechanism when performing this operation could have caused Kepler to enter EM.

“The anomalous EM event is the first that the Kepler spacecraft has encountered during its seven years in space,”NASA said in a statement. Investigators will continue to deduct possible causes, as other researchers continue to prioritize Kepler’s normal functioning. All board systems will be examined ensuring it can continue performance, especially for the Campaign 9 effort.

Other earth observatories will cover the Campaign 9 project for Kepler as maintenance is continued. Campaign 9 will be terminated on July 1 because views of the Milky Way’s center will be compromised.

As operations slowly normalize, NASA will remain alert. NASA believes Kepler’s recovery is attributed to the agency’s swift response and determination and appreciate the support from the public community. NASA is also grateful to Deep Space Network of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other comparable missions that sacrificed their resources for Kepler’s recovery.

New evidence has emerged where Hannibal had crossed the Alps into Italy where defeated the Romans during the Second Punic War around 218 to 201 B.C. After confounding historians for over 2,000 years, geologic records withhold organic revelations. Fecal deposits were unearthed from a swampland likely sourced for water and as a dumping ground for the army and animal cavalcade.

Roman historians couldn’t target the mysterious route, and scholars have debated for millennia since. Chris Allen, an associate professor of environmental microbiology at Queen’s University Belfast, and William Mahaney, of York University in Toronto were conducting research unassociated with Hannibal near Col de la Traversette when the topic presented itself upon a slough, Allen shared with Live Science.

It occurred to them that Hannibal’s army complete with 30,000 troops, 37 elephants, and an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 horses, would have needed to pause for water during his conquest.

Subsequently, Allen’s colleague advised that when animals drink they typically defecate. “We realized if we were lucky enough in this mire to find a layer of sediment that was old enough and hadn’t been disturbed, we might actually be able to find evidence of horse manure that would have been left by his army when they passed through,” said Allen, an associate professor of environmental microbiology.

Scientists excavated a cylindrical sample of soil designated as a core and used carbon dating to establish layers dating back to 8,000 years and detailed physical, chemical, and microbial changes that altered the dirt over time.

They then cross-referenced Hannibal’s timeline to the physical identifiers, and a chemical analysis revealed organic substances that are present in a human’s or animal’s stomach. And a DNA analysis showed the presence of horse manure.

“By combining all these methods, we were able to point strongly to the fact that there was an accumulation of fecal materials at the correct date, about 2,200 years ago,” Allen said. The amount of dung found suggested an unusual animal presence in that region during the time, which also correlates with Hannibal’s crossing, reported in Discovery News.

Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Historically, priests and rulers of ancient societies sanctioned human sacrifice as an appeal to the gods to grant them a plentiful harvest or success in war. A new study suggests, however, that rulers may have had a more strategic motive as well. The study examined over seven dozen Austronesian cultures and found that human sacrifice led to societies becoming less egalitarian, which led to rigid, inherited class systems—the power stayed in power, and the weak remained weak, according to a Washington Post report.

Researchers said in the journal Nature that the study’s implications suggest “darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies,” and that “ritual killings helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors and the large, stratified societies were live in today.”

The studied cultures were all ocean voyagers originating in Taiwan but extended throughout the Pacific extending south to New Zealand and east to Easter Island. The communities were a diverse study group including family-structured and egalitarian communities such as the Isneg in the Philippines and larger, more hierarchical and complex societies of the Hawaiian Islands, which comprised of royal families, slaves, and 100,000 other inhabitants.

Each sub-culture was rated according to a degree of stratification and its relation to engagement in ritual sacrifice. The reason and method of killings varied across the cultures including the death of a chief, construction of a home, war conquests, and to stamp out a disease outbreak among others.

But there was a stark correlation between the number of sacrifices and social hierarchies: the victims were mostly from lower social classes and the more stratified the society was, the higher presence of ritual killings was found.

Certain societies were designated as egalitarian because they prohibited inheritance of wealth and status between succeeding generations; of these, just 25 percent engaged in human sacrifice. But 37 to 46 percent practiced ritual killings from cultures with divided social systems, and among the 27 rigidly separated cultures that enforced limited social mobility, 65 percent committed sacrificial killings.

Lead researcher Joseph Watts, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, noted that elaborate ceremonies exploited the gore and spectacle to instill fear, and the practice continued to function “as a stepping-stone to help build and maintain power in early hierarchical societies.” And once the power structure was secure it maximized policing, taxation, and war to maintain class systems.

“People often claim that religion underpins morality,” Watts told Science, and he says his study illuminates how religious rituals like human sacrifice are often designed to serve particular interests other than the gods: “It shows how religion can be exploited by social elites to their own benefit.”

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef corals—one of the world’s largest coral reef systems—is under threat from unprecedented bleaching. Scientists with the Australian Research Council released a statement in March that the coral ecosystem is witnessing “the worst mass bleaching event in its history.” The report was published in Discovery News.

Bleaching results when atypical environmental conditions damage corals for prolonged periods of time, such as warmer-than-normal waters. Corals react by expelling the green colored algae giving them a washed-out appearance resembling bleach, which can be fatal if the stress drags out too long prohibiting algae from regenerating.

A rare picture of a comet silhouetted against the sun was captured by the Rosetta, a European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft on March 27. The Rosetta was only 205 miles away from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comprised of two lobes, resembling a set of fused snowballs.

The most recent photograph shows the larger of the two balls on top. Shadows are seen spreading onto the coma, the dusty atmosphere surrounding the comet. In February into March of this year, mission leaders navigated the spacecraft close to the frozen mass in order to study the surface’s details. Researchers then maneuvered the Rosetta further away to examine the region around 67P.

“Thanks to the combination of a long, four-second exposure, no attenuation filter and a low-gain setting on the analogue signal processor of NAVCAM (a setting that is used to image bright targets), the image reveals the bright environment of the comet, displaying beautiful outflows of activity streaming away from the nucleus in various directions,” ESA officials released on a news blog for the comet mission.

Each pixel of the image corresponds to 28-miles against a backdrop of stars. A pair of Russian astronomers discovered the comet in 1969, which orbits the sun every 6.44 years. Rosetta was launched in March 2004 to track Comet 67/P after making three passes by the Earth between 2005 and 2009.

Rosetta observed Asteroid Steins followed by a passing of Asteroid Lutetia in the summer of 2010. Rosetta reached Comet 67/P on Aug. 6, 2014. The event was reported in Tech Times.

Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM

Astronomers discovered an exoplanet around a nearby stellar body, TW Hydrae, which resembles our sun; and they believe the mysterious planet could be a successor to Earth.

The strange celestial body was captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory recording images of related planets nearby. Scientists observed a plane of dust and gas with intermittent voids in which fledgling planets could be developing, the most intriguing one positioned the same distance from TW Hydrae as Earth is from the Sun.

The young planet, roughly 10 million years old, is greatly studied because it’s only 175 light years away from Earth, which directly faces observatories, perfect for detailed study. “TW Hydrae is quite special. It is the nearest known protoplanetary disk to Earth and it may closely resemble our Solar System when it was only 10 million years old,” said David Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in a statement.

When researchers discover new planets, they subsequently focus on their habitable zones, interplanetary systems where life could exist. If their distance is too far or close to the sun, then water is unlikely to exist. Additionally, analogous rings have been spotted roughly 1.9 and 3.8 billion miles from the stellar body, distances equitable to Uranus and Pluto’s orbits within our solar system.

ALMA has also targeted other forming solar systems, such as HL Tau, a system estimated to be one million years old. Discoveries like these lead to further research into how systems change over time, which could inform the beginnings of Earth. Reported in Tech Times, the study was originally profiled in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Researchers have a new theory in what caused the dinosaur’s mass extinction. New theories suggest that an exoplanet, designated as Planet X, has been triggering comet showers every 27 million years, which may have caused prehistoric mass extinctions according to a retired astrophysicist reported in Tech Times.

The retired theorist, Daniel Whitmire, is now a math teacher at the University of Arkansas and made a related claim back in 1985. At that point, he taught astrophysics at the University of Louisiana. Whitmore and his colleague, John Matese, detailed the evidence of recurrent comet showers found in a 500 million-year-old fossil.

The fossil led to two theoretical origins; first, a sister star to our Sun could exist, and second, the Sun releases vertical oscillations when it orbits the Milky Way’s center. But as the ninth planet theory became standard the two other contrarian theories receded. But a study conducted at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the undiscovered ninth planet is roughly 10 times Earth’s mass because its oblong-shaped orbit places it near the Kuiper Belt. And its size is so massive that it attracts comets into the solar system’s inner region.

As in 1985, Whitmore suggested that the periodic comet showers cause disruptive collisions. The rocks that miss Earth scatter in space and dim the solar waves emanating from the Sun. In turn, this assists in cooling Earth. “I’ve been part of this story for 30 years. If there is ever a final answer I’d love to write a book about it,” said Whitmire in a University statement.

Not every scientist appeals to his theory. Mike Brown of Caltech believes that the ninth planet being searched for may not be the Planet X. Brown said,”While that idea may or may not make sense, it definitely has nothing to do with Planet Nine, which is much closer to the sun and thus ‘only’ takes 15,000 years to go around.”

Whitmire’s new study was originally published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.